Joliet's Louis' Family Restaurant To Stick To Business As Usual

JOLIET, IL – Like other independently owned businesses, the owners of Louis’ Family Restaurant have been forced to make their fair share of difficult decisions during the coronavirus pandemic.

After initially closing for six weeks in March, Louis’ – the popular breakfast and lunch spot that has been a fixture at 1001 W. Jefferson St., since 1992 – reopened in late April by instituting a drive-thru system that didn’t even exist before the pandemic. But as restaurants across Illinois began reopening for in-house dining on Friday as the state entered Phase 4 of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s Restore Illinois plan, Louis’ made the decision not to reopen its dining room.

Michael Polimenakos, who along with his brother, Nicholas, has been helping his father, Louis, with the family business over the past three months to help the restaurant survive, told Patch on Friday the primary reason for the decision is to protect the health of his parents along with the safety of the restaurant’s staff and customers.

While the restaurant has always offered pick-up and curbside service, it implemented a speedy drive-thru service that has proven successful at a time when other restaurants have struggled during the pandemic to keep their doors open. So when discussions between Louis Polimenakos and his sons began over if they would reopen the dining room like other restaurants, Michael told his father the new system is working well enough not to go back to the old way of doing things.

“Let’s just not even risk it,” Michael Polimenakos said Friday. “I told my dad and brother, ‘let’s just stick to this because it’s working.’ My main priority is my mom and dad’s health because I don’t want them to die. I want them to stay around them to stay around as long as possible.

“But it’s not just about us and our family. It’s about everybody who comes to this restaurant. It’s about safety for everyone.”

Polimenakos has had long discussions with his father about best business practices. And while Louis Polimenakos has come to see how social media and other methods of operating the family restaurant have worked, a diner owner who originally survived on word of mouth recommendations slowly came around to his son’s thinking. That was evidenced a few weeks ago when he looked up from his newspaper in his office inside the restaurant and announced that the new methods are working.

It was then, Polimenakos said, that he knew he had gotten through to his dad.

Now, Polimenakos considers Louis’ a hybrid restaurant that offers the quality of a sit-down restaurant with the affordability and speed of a fast-food eatery. The restaurant has introduced new breakfast and lunch specials that are more economical than other fast-food options and at a higher quality. That aspect is what makes Louis’ unique, Polimenakos said Friday and is, along with the success they've found since reopening in April, what helped strengthen his case not to reopen the dining room.

Since posting the decision on Facebook on Thursday, Polimenakos said the response from customers has been overwhelmingly positive. Because Louis Polimenakos has become such a mainstay in Joliet, his son said that customers have responded to the choice not to reopen the dining room with understanding and support. The reaction, Polimenakos said Friday, affirmed that he and his father and brother made the right choice.

One Facebook post read: “Protect Louis at all cost”.

“We don’t want to anger our customers because we know they want to be inside,” Polimenakos said. “We want them to be inside but we can’t do that right now. I’m not comfortable with that.”

Polimenakos said he and his father and brother will take a wait and see approach to deciding whether they will ever revert back to inside dining. Part of introducing the drive-thru service was because Polimenakos felt the restaurant had to be more innovative. Polimenakos said that the restaurant has exceeded the bare minimum of what it needed to survive and that, at least for now, they will continue with business as usual.

Polimenakos has seen the comments on social media that refer to Louis’ as a little dumpy little diner, which has driven him to change the perception people have about the family-owned establishment. But beyond the aesthetics of what the restaurant looks like, he wants Louis’ to become known for the way the food it serves, the way customers are treated and for the way it dealt with the difficulty of the past three months.

“We did something different and it’s either you adapt or you die basically,” Polimenakos said. “We could do what everybody else is doing or we could try something different and go with it.

“I want people to know that we handled the coronavirus – we handled the challenge and that’s what I want people to remember us for. When the worst time came for everybody, we were able to try to be better for everybody just to help everyone out.”